Nicola Sturgeon: I will not visit Peter Murrell in jail or speak to him again
The former first minister said she felt like a ‘mug’ for worrying about her estranged husband
Nicola Sturgeon has said she will not visit her estranged husband Peter Murrell in jail or speak to him ever again, as she claimed she feels like a “mug” for worrying about him during the police investigation into the SNP’s finances.
The former first minister told an event at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that Murrell had been lying to her “right up to the day he pled guilty”.
It came as she complained about her treatment in the media, saying she felt “rightly or wrongly, that he has had an easier bloody ride than I’ve had”.
She later told a separate event in East Renfrewshire that she no longer loved Murrell.
Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, pled guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from the party earlier this year and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Ms Sturgeon was arrested and released without charge during the long-running police investigation, and her actions have since been the subject of intense scrutiny.
Appearing at Iain Dale’s All Talk show at the Fringe, she said she felt a “complex cocktail of emotions”.
“I suppose there’s part of me still trying to understand this as well, because I’ve been so deeply betrayed by this person and yet part of me still found myself worrying about whether he was okay,” she said.
“I find that easier now that he’s no longer there in front of me.
“It’s a really complex cocktail of emotions, because you can’t just stop caring about somebody that you’ve been married to for as long, lived with for even longer.
“It’s almost like it becomes two separate people. There’s the person you thought you knew, that you still kind of care about, and there’s this person that you’re now only starting to know or understand.”
Ms Sturgeon said she did not know Murrell was going to plead guilty until less than than a week before he appeared in court, despite it emerging that he had been negotiating a guilty plea for months.
“I found out less than a week, I think, before he pled guilty that he was going to plead guilty, so I didn’t have very long to kind of prepare myself for that,” she said. “I had still been thinking, ‘Oh, he’s going to go to trial, that might be a year away’.
“But when the prosecution read out some of the detail of it in court, there was this line that hit me like a ton of bricks, and it was that he had been negotiating a guilty plea since March 3. And I hadn’t known that.
“And so, what point am I making? He was still lying to me right up to the day he pled guilty, and that’s a really, really, really hard thing to process.”
She said Murrell had been “very isolated” during the period he was under investigation.
“I’m not trying to provoke sympathy for him at all, but he was very isolated, he very rarely left the house, he wasn’t communicative,” she said.
“So yeah, I was a bit worried about his wellbeing, his mental health. And now I kind of think, what a mug, why were you worried about him? He didn’t worry about you.”
Ms Sturgeon said the SNP was the victim of Murrell’s crime, but added: “What he has subjected me to is beyond anything I could ever have comprehended. I don’t understand why he did it. He had no need to do it.
“I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will understand his motivation. But whatever that motivation was, he could not have stopped at any point and thought about me, and yet I was still, at least up until recently, worrying about him.”
The former first minister said she would not visit him in prison. “I’m not going to speak to him, I’m not going to visit him,” she said.
She highlighted the media focus on her as a result of his crimes, adding: “There was a period just after he pled guilty where my name and picture was on more front pages than his were.
“I was the first minister. I expect scrutiny and accountability for the things I do. I’m not responsible for the crimes of someone else.
“And I have felt at times, rightly or wrongly, that he has had an easier bloody ride than I’ve had, and it feels deeply unjust and deeply unfair.
“So no, I’m not going to spend any more time worrying about him.”
Elsewhere, Ms Sturgeon accused JK Rowling of being “obsessed” with her as she also took aim at former SNP MP Joanna Cherry, calling her recently published book “sh*t”.
The Harry Potter author has long been a fierce critic of Ms Sturgeon over the latter’s stance on trans rights.
Over the weekend, Ms Rowling called the former first minister a “world-class misogynist” and “the blindest wife ever to enjoy the fruits of a fraudster husband’s theft”.
Ms Sturgeon was asked by an audience member if she should declare an amnesty with Ms Rowling “in the spirit of sisterhood”.
She replied: “I’ll say this as gently and as directly [as I can], I’m not at war with JK Rowling - she seems to be at war with me. If there’s going to be an amnesty, I think it’s probably going to have to come from her.
“We disagree on more than one thing. We disagreed on independence, we clearly disagree on trans rights, but my God, that woman is obsessed with me and I don’t spend as much time thinking about her as she clearly does about me, so sorry.”
Another audience member asked what question she would like Mr Dale to put to Ms Cherry when he interviews her on Monday.
Ms Cherry has been highly critical of Ms Sturgeon’s time in charge of the SNP, accusing her of being an anti-intellectual who ran the country and her party in a “Stalinist” way.
Ms Sturgeon said: “Again, somebody else who seems to have an obsession with me that I’m afraid is not reciprocated. It’s an unrequited obsession.
“It’s not a question, it’s a challenge, right: can she get through more than 30 seconds of the answer to any question without talking about me?”
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